Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning, a companion piece to The Social Network, arrives in theaters on October 9 as a dramatization of the Facebook Files scandal and whistleblower Frances Haugen's time inside the company. The film stars Mikey Madison as Haugen and Jeremy Allen White as Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, the journalist she turns to after concluding that no one at Facebook will take her concerns seriously.
The movie, billed as a companion piece rather than a direct sequel to The Social Network, centers on Haugen's work as a product manager on Facebook's civic integrity team and traces how the company's pursuit of exponential growth turned it into a societal threat. It opens in 2019, as Haugen begins to understand how hate speech and misinformation are amplified by the platform's algorithms. When she realizes that colleagues will not speak up about Mark Zuckerberg's focus on boosting engagement at all costs, she approaches Horwitz.
Sorkin, who wrote and directed the film, presents Haugen and Horwitz as uneasy allies who recognize that Facebook is the news for millions of people but can only report the truth about the company through old-fashioned methods. The film echoes Sorkin's The Newsroom in Horwitz's exchanges with bureau chief Christina, played by Betty Gilpin, and overworked interns played by Aidan Laprete and Kelley Pereira. The 112-minute film moves back and forth through the years of Haugen's employment, and its most tense moments come when Haugen and Horwitz meet secretly in parks and hotel rooms to review internal documents showing Facebook knew its products could cause harm.
Jeremy Strong plays Zuckerberg as an older, more calculating figure preparing to speak at Congressional hearings, a performance the film uses to suggest a man willing to prioritize profit over people's well-being. The Social Reckoning also stars Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Billy Magnussen, Patrick Fischler, and Nelson Franklin. Sorkin's rapidfire dialogue, dense with information, limits how well the movie works as an entertaining drama, and the film arrives too late to have the impact of its predecessor.
The Social Reckoning makes the implicit argument that the modern internet might not be so bad today if Zuckerberg had acted more conscientiously while trying to stay ahead of competitors. It also serves as a reminder that no substantive reckoning has fundamentally changed how people interact with Meta's products. Sorkin appears to believe a day may come when the public decides companies like Meta cannot be trusted to shape perceptions of reality.
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